Picasso Dreams

The Prison Industry

The following (a slightly edited version),was given by Nora Callahan at the 12th Annual Drug Policy Foundation Conference on May 21, 1999

I'm going to talk about the prison industrial complex today, more particularly, the privatization of prisons. I could stand before you with statistics that would shock you at first and then I'd have to watch your eyes glaze over, so we will put a few statistics on the overhead and talk for a little while about what this means, and should mean to every American.

Corporate profits are being made in a grand scale on the backs of American prisoners. Corporate profits soar as prisons overflow with people, our fellow citizens, many who are nonviolent people who endure inhumane treatment in the name of the war on drugs and our war on crime.

Corporate profits are vested in inhumanity and in how well they can guise the inhumanity and it is spreading world-wide. These prison corporations do it well. And it's happened before, people trading in humans and profits "earned" by some in taking away the freedom of many.

Political agendas have flourished by turning entire segments of citizenry into captives. This is nothing new. The historical reference has been given simple terms by which they are remembered today. American Slavery immediately comes to mind; Stalinism, we all know at least of few details of that terrible regime. The most renown era of history in which relocation camps became concentration camps, then death camps we now call Nazism and the Holocaust followed.

We don't yet know what name this American era will one day be called, because it isn't over yet. In fact, it has just begun and before it's roots sink deeper, we need to end the drug war and the war on crime and all war on American people because you can't win a war like that. Everyone looses, except the stockholders.

Too much money is now being made on prisoners. The taxpayer foots the bill, but corporate and community profits are keeping the scales balanced too keenly, therefore it is our responsibility not to act as "good Germans" and take nothing more than casual notice. This system, this prison industrial complex is working very efficiently and profits outweigh some of the cost, and that is our growing concern.

In Texas, a group of children left their chairs in Sunday School, got down on their knees and clasped their hands and prayed. They prayed that a new prison would open in their neighborhood. They prayed fervently so that their under-educated parents could earn $10,000 more dollars a year than a tenured teacher and so that their community could prosper.

Read the rest of the article here.

For a related article with more stattistics, click here.

‘No hijackers for 9/11’

Repentant arms dealer reveals disgruntled
U.S. military on the verge of revolt

By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net

Back in May 2003, a journalist in Portugal reported on a sensational, marathon meeting of a group of U.S. pilots that issued a report concluding that the story told by the U.S. government about what happened on Sept. 11, 2001 was improbable and unlikely.

Except for several notices on the Internet, that story was basically never reported in the U.S., and largely debunked when the reporter flubbed the name of the organizer, creating disbelief in the minds of many readers.

The record was corrected in stunning fashion Feb. 25 on Alex Jones’ Prison Planet radio program when former Pentagon arms salesman Donn de Grand-Pre, author of three books that allege 9/11 was an inside job, set the record straight, because he was the man who organized that conference. That 72-hour non-stop symposium by a group of military and civilian pilots concluded the flight crews of the four passenger airliners involved in the 9/11 tragedy had no control over their aircraft.

de Grand Pre, a retired Army colonel, is the author of “A Window on America,” “Confessions of an Arms Peddler” and his latest, “Barbarians Inside the Gates.” His thesis in the third book “is that the wars we have engaged in for whatever reasons since the end of World War II have not only been unconstitutionally waged, but have caused a net loss in political power. Each war was waged to divert our attention away from the true enemy within, and toward a contrived enemy outside our borders.”

de Grand-Pre explained that his third book actually has three parts: “OK, I’ve got three books out under the title, "Barbarians Inside the Gates." Book 1 was "The Serpent’s Sting," Book 2 is "The Viper’s Venom," Book 3, which just came out is “The Rattler’s Revenge.”

“And I’d like to quote from Book 2, which came out October of 2002. There is a very important paragraph there. It says,

"The trigger for the 911 activity was the imminent and unstoppable worldwide financial collapse which can only be prevented temporarily by a major war, perhaps to become known as World War III. To bring it off one more time, martial law will probably be imposed in the United States."

de Grand-Pre was the top U.S. arms dealer to the Middle East under the Ford and Carter administrations. What he saw caused him to leave government service and begin investigating the forces he saw warping our nation’s future.